John Singer Sargent fans excited by the Sargent & Paris exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York are invited to spend time with an early work by the celebrated artist on view right here at the Allentown Art Museum. Sargent, an American painter who traveled widely and lived most of his life abroad, is best known for his skillful, studied portraits. The work on view in our American galleries is interesting because it was painted when Sargent was in his mid-twenties and reveals a more experimental side of the artist.
John Singer Sargent (1856-1925), Head of a Young Woman, 1878-1880, oil on canvas. Allentown Art Museum: Gift of Katherine Merle-Smith Thomas (2008.22)
At the time he painted Head of a Young Woman, 1878-1880, Sargent was living in Europe and studying under the influential painter Carolus-Duran in Paris. He traveled during these years, from Venice and Naples to Spain and Morocco. Head of a Young Woman may have been painted during a visit to the Italian island of Capri, a destination popular with artists and known for the distinctive beauty of its residents. Mysterious and suggestive, there is an androgyny about the figure, and the artist’ s choice to portray his subject with little clothing, tousled hair, shaded eyes, and long, trailing, delicate jewelry is exoticizing.
Unlike Sargent’s later, formal commissions, this portrait is daring in its roughness and incompleteness. The brushwork is loose and spontaneous—what some describe as draughtsmanly—as if Sargent were drawing with paint.
“The lighting on the face is so bright, you wonder if the portrait may have been done in raking sunlight,” says AAM vice president of curatorial affairs Elaine Mehalakes.
Head of a Young Woman reveals a personal touch from the artist as well. Inscribed “To my friend Dannat, John S. Sargent,” it was a gift to William Turner Dannat, a fellow expatriate artist and student of Carolus-Duran. The painting even makes a cameo in Dannat’s own work, Studio Interior, Paris (1882), where it hangs casually among other pieces—evidence of its role as a shared gesture between two young artists working abroad.
John Singer Sargent, Rosina Ferrara (Capri Peasant—Study), 1879, oil on canvas. Private collection
Mehalakes recently traveled to New York to see the Met show, discovering an uncanny likeness among the many works on display. “When I saw the exhibition, I wondered if Rosina Ferrara could be the model for our painting as well.” Ferrara (1861-1934), a young woman who lived in Capri, was depicted by Sargent in other works, including his painting Dans les Oliviers à Capri (Among the Olive Trees, Capri), also on view at the Met.
A curatorial mystery solved? Decide for yourself, but definitely make it a point to see Head of a Young Woman on your next visit to the AAM.